Winners and Losers: Factors Affecting Daily Fantasy Sports Addiction

The growing popularity of daily fantasy sports (DFS) services such as DraftKings and FanDuel has created a new medium for sports gambling. With the emergent DFS industry, a growing number of consumers could be classified as being addicted to DFS. Thus, this paper examines the factors leading to DFS addiction. We propose that several factors influence consumer perceived hedonic benefits and utilitarian benefits of DFS that affect their addictive behavior. These features include competition, emotion, escapism, ease of use, cost, financial impact, and social interaction. Based on our proposed research framework, a series of hypotheses are presented. This research is one of the first to examine the factors leading to DFS addiction and could provide early insights for practitioners and academics interested in exploring DFS